Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Compiling a "Best
of" collection is a risky business. I have never been asked to do such a
thing, but can guess what pressures the compiler must consider. There is the
problem of "making a book," which usually necessitates some variety
as to subject matter and style—not all experimental, not all conventional
realism. Then there is the issue of a mixed representation of authors—not all
well-knowns, not all unknowns.

Foremost, of course, there
is the issue of subjectivity. Everyone has his or her own particular
preferences about favorite kinds of stories, favorite styles, approaches, etc.
I have read all five volumes of The Best
British Short Stories and have enjoyed the experience. I admire and respect
Nicholas Royle's editorial expertise and appreciate his efforts to stimulate
interest in the short story among British writers and readers.

However, as my last post
indicates, I do not always have the same opinion of some of the stories in the
2011 collection as he perhaps does. Of course, although I have read thousands
of stories in my career, I have not read the hundreds of stories he read from
which he chose the twenty in the collection. So I cannot question his judgment
that he has chosen the twenty best stories published in England in 2010.

The best I can do in this
final post on the 2011 edition of The
Best British Short Stories is to come clean about my own personal
preferences about some of the stories—those that I liked and those that I did
not particularly like—and try to explain why.

Lee Rourke's "Emergency
Exit" is a second-person point of view story that places the narrator in a
no-exit situation seeing himself as if he were outside himself, feeling
unsettled and not caring what he is doing. His detachment from reality is suggested
by his noting that the Emergency Exit sign is in Helvitica or maybe Microsoft
Sans Serif. He feels empty, as if he does not exist, as if nothing exists. A
man's eyes are like "two dark pools of nothingness." "Finally, you feel nothing." Everything
is without consequence or meaning. "I don't know where I'm going," he
says. The story reads a bit like a classroom exercise in which the professor
has asked students to write a story about meaninglessness. It raises the old
conundrum of whether one can write about meaninglessness with the story
becoming meaningless.

"Foreigner,"
which springs from the Falklands War, is a relatively transparent story about
the horrors of war and thus lends itself to generalized polemic. Inevitably, in
such a story, the central character recalls killing an enemy soldier and cannot
get it out of his mind. Also inevitably,
men talk about wars being about freedom, while mothers say their son did not
die for freedom . "There was nothing noble about the way he was sacrificed,"
a mother says, putting polemical statements in the mouths of characters. And as
the central character recalls killing an enemy soldier, he has a taste in his mouth
like a "rotting tooth." Such a story makes set pieces and clichés
seem inevitable as the woman says about her lost son, "Our marriage is
past. Even Alex is in the past now. And we've got to live in the present."
Getting tangled in such generalities then leads to more clichés, and bad
metaphors like "the word cracked like ice beneath too heavy a
weight." The story illustrates an
important truth—that just because the story deals with an important subject
does not make it an important story. War stories are often guilty of this, for
war is such a huge and important subject.
But it does not make for an important story unless the language controls
it, as it does, for example in American writer Tim O'Brien's "The Things
They Carried."

Sometimes stories just
want to be clever and smart and satiric. In Adam Marek's "Dinner of the
Dead Alumni." England's Trinity College at Cambridge is celebrating the
350th anniversary of its most famous alumnus, Isaac Newton, and the
100th anniversary of Ludwig Wittgenstein's attendance at the
college. This gives Marek the opportunity to make use of some research and
evoke ghosts of AA Milne, Jawaharlal Nehru, Aleister Crowley, John Dryden, and
Francis Bacon. This context backgrounds a story about the narrator recalling an
old girlfriend telling him that for every person there is a partner so perfect
that if you touch that person you'll both have an immediate simultaneous
orgasm. Although this seems like a most inconvenient gift, he yearns for it,
for "an orgasm that one did not have to work for, that came unsolicited at
some unsuspecting moment, would surely be the most wondrous of all." The
story exists for the two concepts.It is
clever, but is that enough to create a good story?.

Sometimes stories just
want to play around with writing conventions. Philip Langeskov's "Notes on
a Love Story1" is a very brief story about a man who has just got his
first short story published in in Paris
Review; when he shares this news with his girlfriend they see a huge flock
of geese. It is the eleven academic style endnotes that make up the real story.
Some just supply information, e.g. who is George Plimpton and William Maxwell? But most of them provide personal information
about the narrator/author and his relationship with his girlfriend. It strikes me as a gimmick that does not seem
essential other than to suggest that the narrator is first and foremost a
writer.

The fact that I like SJ
Butler's "The Swimmer" probably gives me away as a reader who prefers
stories driven by an emotion, a mysterious obsession and written in a lyrical
fashion without lots of explanation or ideology or sociology. The story is
about a woman who decides to go swimming in the river that she can see from her
study. I like the prose that creates her situation:

"Down here at water level, she realises,
not only is she invisible to the rest of the world, but it is invisible to
her. The tops of the banks are at least
ten feet above her so all she can see is the river, the banks and the sky. Her
focus narrowed, she begins to notice tiny details; here where the river is
kinked around a root, there are weeds with narrow dark green leaves. In places
the banksides have been scraped back to bare earth by the spring floods , and
high up there are clusters of miniature animal holes"

During her swim, she sees
a swan: "She had never before realised the sheer size of a swan. Down
here, on its level, she is insignificant." The woman begins to spend more
and more time in the river, becoming more and more obsessed with the swan. Many days later, she swims nearer to the swan
and sees it is trapped in a nylon fishing line. She swims round and round the
swan unraveling the thread, until she frees the bird and it drifts away from
her in the current. She lets the current
take her too and catches a faint glimpse of the swan a white puff in the
distance. "And at the next bend she cannot tell it from the mist rising
from the water."

Call me a romantic and be
damned. But I like this lyrical obsessive connection between the woman and the water
and the swan. I don't know anything more
about the woman, nor do I need to to participate in her magical and mysterious
union with a rhythm and reality of the natural/ world.

I also like Heather
Leach's "So Much Time in a Life," mainly because its fairy-tale
language lures me in: "To begin with there were three children. The first, a girl with hair so dark and wet
that, as she came out of me, it looked like a seal pelt: the sleek fur of a
creature slipping from its underwater world onto the soft rock of my breast."
The story plays a bit with point of view: "When is the moment when she
becomes I? Is this it? They say that
most people hate it, the author stepping into her story, spoiling the fictional
dream. I hate it too, but here she is,
here I am, breaking, breaking, breaking the frame." The story is, like a
few others in the collection, about the writing process, but here, rather than
being just a gimmick, it seems right for a story that is about the relationship
between reality and the life of the imagination, a story about a woman creating
her children and losing them, about a woman's netherworld of what is real and
what is imagined.

Kirsty
Logan, "The Rental Heart" A clever trope derived from a futuristic
technology of being about to rent a heart, but the story exists only for the
extended metaphor.

I liked Bernie
McGill's "No Angel, "from the first sentence: "The first time I
saw my father after he died, I was in the shower, hair plastered with conditioner
, when the water stuttered and turned cold." I liked the rest of the story
because of the restrained way it deals with death in Northern Ireland. But, sometimes I like a story because it
strikes a personal note. I liked this
story because my mother-in-law, a wonderful woman who came to America from
Belfast after WWII to marry an American soldier she met at a dance, had just
died at age 90 when I read it. She was a wonderful woman who my wife and I
cared for the last few years. Purely
personal reason, but unavoidable.

John Burnside,
"Slut's Hair" is another favorite for me because of my empathy with a
woman who is married to a brutish husband who insists on pulling out one of her
bad teeth with a pair of pliers. The woman feels helpless against the man, so
she creates something to save from him, since she cannot save herself—an
imaginary mouse she constructs out of a fistful of dust that her mother called
"slut's hair."

Sometimes I read a story
that I like, but am unable to say why, for example, Alison Moore's "When
the Door Closed, It Was Dark" about a young British au pair girl who is
hired by a family in a foreign country. There is a baby in the family she is to
help care for, but the mother is mysteriously not there. The atmosphere is
oppressive, even threatening, and the story is loaded with premonitions about
something happening to the baby, but even though I feel the story is too
self-consciously wired, there is something about the vulnerability of the young
woman that arouses my sympathy, and then the expected unexpectedly happens at
the end. Hard to resist.

I don't care for stories
that feel they have to explain everything. Sally Vickers's
"Epiphany," for example, "He had mourned his absent father,
fiercely, inconsolably, endlessly, desperately." "The note of whimsy
was terrible." "Charlie…felt a further rush of absolving
relief." "He felt nothing. Not
even contempt." "He could never have envisaged this hesitant man with
the unsettle squeak and tremor in his voice. Sharply, fervently, he wished this
newly recovered parent to the bottom of the sea." Just too much explanation
of feelings.

I am going to try to talk
about other volumes in the Best British
Short Stories series in future blogs, but I will probably only focus on those that
are my favorites. My mother always said, "If you can't say something nice about some thing, don't say anything at all." That isn't easy, Mom, but I will try.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

It seems tautological, not
to mention obvious, to say, but the basic reason the short story is not a
popular form nowadays is that most people don't like stories that are short,
but rather stories that are long. There have been times in the past when short
stories were widely read—in England during the 1890s and in America in the
1920s—but today? not so much, although there does seem to be a resurgence of
interest in England recently.

Some of this drop in
popularity has to do with media, for short stories used to be widely read when
periodical magazines were the main means of print distribution.

Short fiction films,
defined by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an original
motion picture with a running time of 40 minutes or less, have never had a wide
distribution in theaters. They are
usually made by independent film makers for nonprofit, with a low budget,
usually funded by grants.

In the so-called
"Golden Age of Television" in the 1950, anthology shows, such as The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents were very
popular. Now folks watch scripted series shows on television with different
stories each week, but with the same main characters, often engaged in a
continuing back story about their lives. For example, the popular American
series How to Get Away with Murder
features a tough professor/lawyer with a small group of smart student followers
in which, behind separate cases each week, there runs a continuous story of the
murder of the lawyer's husband by the students.

The growing trend to watch
a number of episodes of a series on Netflix or Amazon featuring the same
characters in what has been called binge viewing is just one more indication
that folks like long continuous stories rather than short individual ones.

Writers who write short
stories in the hopes that they will find readers thus always face the problem
of distribution. It usually goes this
way. A writer submits a story to various small journals, usually sponsored by
universities or nonprofits, and if he or she can publish at least a dozen
stories this way, an agent or publisher might be willing to publish them in a
collection of stories, that is if the author looks promising and promises a
novel next time. It helps if some of the stories are picked up by one of the
"Best" anthologies. The collection will probably sell better if the
author strings the stories together around the same characters and the
publisher can promote the book a novel in stories.

It is next to impossible
to make a living this way, which usually means that writers have to teach in
the growing number of MFA programs in England and American. Sometimes it seems as if there are more
writers of short stories than there are readers. Or, put another way, it seems that aspiring
short story writers are the primary audience for published short stories.

The Internet has made
possible some new technological means by which authors can get stories in print
and in front of an audience—on special websites devoted to story publication
and on blogs. However, Nicholas Royle has taken an old-fashioned 16th
century approach to getting short stories out there. He started Nightjar Press and began
publishing short stories as chapbooks in limited, numbered editions, autographed
by the authors. At my last count, there are twenty titles in the series. Mr.
Royle was kind enough to send me the following five for my reading pleasure.

Christopher Kenworthy, "sullom hill"

Tom Fletcher, "The Home"

Elizabeth Stout, "Touch Me With Your Cold, Hard
Fingers"

Joel Lane, "black country" (now out of print)

Alison Moore, "The Harvestman"

I have read all five of
the books (stories), enjoying them all.
And "enjoy" is the keyword here. My impression of the stories
is that they were chosen to be read once with some pleasure, not to be studied
and savored through rereadings. They strike me as that hybrid form combining
characteristics of the popular plot-based story with some characteristics of
the language-based literary story. Sometimes the weight is more toward
literary, as in Alison Moore's "The Harvestman," and sometimes more
toward the popular, as with Elizabeth Stout's "Touch Me With Your Cold,
Hard Fingers." Sometimes the weight shifts toward genre story, albeit with
literary characteristics, as with the traditional hard-bitten detective story
of Joel Lane's "black country," and sometimes a bit more toward the
experimental as with Tom Fletcher's "The Home" or the literary with
Christopher Kenworthy's "sullom hill."

Because these stories are
a pleasure to read for their plot, it would spoil your pleasure if I were to
give those plots away. Suffice to say, I liked reading these stories and I give
Mr. Royle great credit for promoting interest in the short story by making them
available. I assume that if all but seven of the twenty titles in the series
are out of print, he must have succeeded in his plans and made enough money to
defray publication costs. It is nice to have a single thin volume with a nice
cover and an author autograph inside.

A July Facebook post
indicates that three other titles are still in print: "Puck" by David
Rose, "The Jungle," by Conrad Williams, and "M" by Hilary
Scudder.

You can email nightjar@gmail.com to place an order for
any of the seven titles that may still be in print. Thanks to Nicholas Royle, a
true champion of the short story in England, for sharing these chapbooks with
me.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Last year at the
Independent Bath Literature festival, Hanif Kureishi raised a bit of musty dust
by declaring that creative writing courses were a waste of time. Whether anyone
can teach another to be a "creative writer" is an old fuss and
doesn't interest me. The answer is, of course, both "yes" and
"no."

What most caught my eye in
the report of Kureishi's rant was his claim that students don't understand that
it's the story that really counts. "They worry about the writing and the
prose and you think: 'Fuck the prose, no one's going to read your book for the
writing, all they want to do is find out what happens in the story next.'"

Maybe Kureishi is right
about many novels that, eager to make money and get on to what happens next,
consist of piss-poor prose—but certainly not a real short story—at least a
short story that aims to be more than a mere time-passer on the bus or on the
pot.

I agree with George
Saunders, a much better short-story writer than Kureishi, who says that the
litmus test for him is always the language. In his essay, “Thank You, Esther
Forbes," Saunders says a
sentence is more than just a fact-conveyor; it also makes a certain sound, and
could have a thrilling quality of being over-full, saying more than its length
should permit it to say. A sequence of such sentences exploding in the brain
makes the invented world almost unbearably real. Saunders says, and I agree, by
honing the sentences you use to describe the world, you change the inflection
of your mind, which changes your perceptions.

To claim that all readers
that want to do is to find out what happens next shows a lack of respect for
the reader. I want to comment briefly today on a few stories in the 2011 Best British Short Stories that raise Kureishi's
"fuck the prose" condescension.

If you don't think
precision of language and a perfectly controlled and coherent tone is important
in a story; if you think plot is important or realism or raw emotion is important,
read Leone Ross's "Love Silk Food" and consider how language is the
key to a great story. Here is her opening sentence:

"Mrs. Neecy Brown's
husband is falling in love. She can tell because the love is stuck to the walls
of the house, making the wallpaper sticky, and it seeps into the calendar in
her kitchen, so bad that she can't see what the date is and the love keeps
ruining the food: whatever she does or however hard she concentrates,
everything turns to mush."

Outrageous metaphors work
if, when you really think about them, they have an irresistible logic. The
problem this story raises and solves is how to create the emotions of a woman
whose husband is cheating on her without making it a cliché, or sentimental, or
sad, or tedious. Language does it here.
For example, Mrs. Brown has six daughters, all born geometric in shape: cube,
heptagon, rectangle and two triangles so prickly "that she locked up shop
on Mr. Brown for nearly seven months. He was careful when he finally got back
in that their last daughter was a perfectly satisfactory and smooth-sided
sphere."

And if you want an example
of how a story weakens when the writer feels the necessity of plot, notice how
this story loses energy when the woman encounters a man who seems interested in
what she has to say and she finds herself in the role of the kind of
"excitement women" her husband chases. This reduction to plot does
not wreck the story, but it does make it limp a bit at the end.

Then there is Hilary
Mantel. I am not sure how revered Mantel is in England, although I suspect that
a two-time winner of the Booker for well-researched historical novels would
quite possibly be publicly adored. Good for her. But that doesn't mean she can write a decent short story. Although
I guess it would be hard to resist
including two stories by one of England's most respected novelists, I just
cannot see that either of her two stories in the 2001 Best British Short Stories are anything but dashed-off, plot-based,
pot-boilers.

The first thing that
distracts me about the story "Winter Break" is the use of novelistic
detail that has nothing to do with the significance of the story, just minor
observations to make the reader nod knowingly that the writer is most
perceptive. For example, when the couple arrive, the woman picks the cloth of
her T-shirt away from her back, prompting Mantel to observe: "We dress for
the weather we want, as if to bully it, even though we've seen the
forecast." Mantel then wisely notes that there are two types of taxi men:
the garrulous ones with a niece in Dagenham who want to talk and the ones who
"needed every grunt racked out of them" and wouldn't tell you where
their niece lived under torture. Again, the reader smiles wryly at such
perceptive observation.

The fact that Mantel notes
several times that the husband finds small children unbearable should alert us
that this is what the story is going to be about in some way. So it is no
surprise when the driver hits something, that the husband assumes, "kid."
When the driver picks up a rock and pounds on what he hit, the wife assumes it
is "Tomorrow's dinner". The story ends when the driver takes their
luggage out of the boot and the wife sees not a cloven hoof of an animal, but
the "grubby hand of a human child."

That, I suggest, makes
for a grubby little horror story.
Obviously, the dead child is a reminder to the woman of her husband's distaste
for children. And the cloven hoof reference is a "devilish" allusion. But what is this story about? Nothing, just poor prose and a plot that
shocks. Kureishi would probably like it.

Mantel's "Comma"
is a predictable childhood buddies, good girl/bad girl, poor girl/middle-class
girl story. In case we might miss that, Mantel announces it flatly in the
second paragraph as the girls ask each other if they are rich.

The most common convention
Mantel uses in the story is that of the fairy-tale, which she lays on so
heavily that she perhaps thinks we have never read one. The first-person
narrator announces that in a fairytale picture book you live in the forest
under dripping cables with a thatch roof, and you have a basket with a
patchwork cover with which you visit your grandma. When she says she is not
supposed to mention her friend Mary
Joplin's name, she images her as a two-dimensional character from a picture
book, "beaten thin and flat"—such a shadow-like figure that the
narrator is not sure if she even exists when she is not with her. These bookish
references culminate in the central metaphor of the mysterious creature shaped
like a comma. And then again, when the narrator relates the story of Mary's
mother who spat in a stew a woman brought to her and says if it were not the
persistence of the story, she might have thought she dreamed Mary and that time
has sprinkled the story with mercies like fairy dust.

Claire Massey's
"Feather Girls" is a better use of the fairy tale motif than
"Comma" precisely because of the restraint and control of the
language that makes it shimmer with significance rather than clamor with
cliché. The story is about an old mythic notion that women are somehow magical,
mysterious creatures that comes from a world of nature and myth and that
somehow men—who are merely men--must capture the creature and make it human by
stealing that aspect of it that binds it to the magical world. Mermaid stories
are such myths. John Sayles' film The Secret of Roan Innish, based on the
children's novel by Rosalie K. Fry, is about this legend. If it is not a selkie or seal whose skin is
taken away, then it is the feathers of a swan, as in Claire Massey's
story. The story works because of the
universality of the myth and Massey's restraint in framing it in the simplest
of situations of one man who always fails to be worthy of the feather girl he
desires.

Michele Roberts'
"Tristram and Isolde" raises another issue about the relationship of
language to plot. I had to read the story several times because I was not
really sure at first who the narrator is. The story sounds as if it is told by
a young woman with her lover, as he sighs to her, Izzy, my darling" and
she sleeps in his arms with her legs wrapped around him. He plunges his hands
into her "mop" of curls, telling her she has pointed ears like an
elf. When he eats meat, the smell from his body makes her feel a wolf is
hugging her. This metaphor is followed up by her knotting a pieces of string
around his wrist like a leash; he jumps up and down and growls, pawing her,
pretending to lick her nose.

The language is
insufferably adolescent: "Love, like sap, a green juice, coursed from his
heart down his arm through our joined hand sup my arm into my heart."
"This morning I felt I could eat the whole world, roll it on my tongue
crisp as pastry, tart and sweet as oranges."

When they walk in the
forest, branches are like the ears of deers pricking up and become transformed
into a red stag, his antlers like a "tall crown, candelabra of bone."
The stag is like a king of the woods, and she wants to fall down on the ground
and salute him. They come to an oak tree that has a hollow trunk—"our
secret room"—and she says it is like the chapter when Tristram and Isolde
run away and live in the forest secretly. She says to her herself that they are
married now. She says she is his real wife, the one he secretly loved best and
his other wife is far away where she could not see them.

The language is so thickly
adolescent that I find myself skimming, for it goes on and on repeating the
same kind of romantic fantasy. "We'd hold our breath when the searchers
cam past: they'd never guess what strange creatures nested" in the trees
and they were one single "creature of shared love." "Time stopped. The world broke in two
and the fragments flying apart hit me in the face, in the mouth, in the
teeth."

Then abruptly the fantasy
is broken when the man says "Look at the time" and she knows that
lovers have to part, especially secret lovers outlaw lovers. Then we find out what has been going on, for
on the bus she says he puts on a fake charming voice so all the old ladies
would think what a good father he is. "You want to see Mummy, don't you, Izzy
darling" And your new little brother."

Now we know it is a child
and she is jealous of the new baby as she kicks its cot. The story ends with a
final fantasy of escape as the child becomes invisible, leaps up to the
windowsill and flies out back to the green park, merging with the undergrowth,
dissolving to become her new true self, calling to her deer to surround her,
then vanishing with them into the "heart of the forest."

The problem the story
raises for me is that it deceives the reader into thinking one thing—that a
young woman is with her lover—and then "surprises the reader by letting us
know it is a female child fantasying
about her father. If you had known it was a child from the beginning, how would
you have reacted? If the only thing that makes the story a story is the plot trick,
is that enough to justify wading through the childish romanticism of the rest
of it, even if that romanticism is satire?

After all this talk about
plot vs. prose, I wonder if it is possible to like a story with ordinary prose
because of the compelling nature of the plot.
On the other hand, is it possible to like a story with an
inconsequential plot because it has very fine prose?

"Moving Day" by
Robert Edric is, for me, a story that has little plot interest, but I like the
sentences: "A fly flew across the small apartment and tapped against the
glass as though testing it for a flaw, searching for an escape."

"It was another
beginning—a time before the first ending, before the last decade—before the
upper floors had finally been abandoned to the heat and the dust and when the
inhabitants of the hightree apartments had congregated on the walled roof of
the tower."

And the concluding
paragraph:

"Proctor repeated the
names, mesmerized by what he'd retrieved, and this time, Miller joined him, the
two men word-and emphasis-perfect in their shared mantra, smiles on their
faces, their eyes closed, boys together, conducing themselves with the vague
and liquid movement of their fingers, and hearing somewhere in the room,
somewhere across the forty years which at once divided and connected them, the
muted time-keeping tapping of the solitary fly as it resumed its own
unstoppable journey into the light that had for so long remained beyond its reach."

"Looted" by Dai
Vaughan is a brief story about a soldier in World War II who takes a small
landscape painting from a shelled apartment. Many years later he sees a
photograph of the apartment with the painting visible. He surrenders the
painting to the German authorities and then begins trying to copy the painting
from memory. Then one day when his
eldest son takes him and his wife for a drive in the British countryside; he
sees a landscape that looks like the lost painting. The story ends with a
moment when he feels he must decide whether to enter the landscape or not. The complexity of this moment is whether by
entering the landscape he might delete the memory of the painting. He thinks
that by turning away he can allow the remembered painting to remain as it was,
but is not sure whether or not it is already too late. The last line is:
"He hesitates. And then his family
calls him to the car." Although the
prose is fairly transparent, the concept is intriguing, for it explores the
complex relationship between art and reality.

I will post one more brief
essay on issues raised for me by the remaining stories in Best British Short Stories 2011.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

I
have been rereading the stories in the Best
British Short Stories series,
beginning with the first volume, 2011. In his Introduction, Nicholas Royle says
that short stories often get "short shrift" from readers because many
have little point to them. He says there has to be something: an "epiphany,
or a change of heart, or pace or tone; a twist, perhaps, a revelation that
calls into question everything that came before." I agree, for I have little patience with pieces
that are merely parts of novels, slices of "life," or experimental finger
exercises.

Royle
says he would rather be left with questions than answers after reading a story,
with a "vague feeling of uncertainty rather than one of satisfaction at
how neatly everything has been tied up." He wants the story's questions
and ambiguities to remain with him." Most writers I have read would agree
with that, and so do I.

Thus,
it seems appropriate that I begin with the first story, David Rose's
"Flora," which indeed left me with a satisfying feeling of uncertainty.
I have read the story several times now, and am still pleasantly puzzled by it.
I was first attracted to the language of the first-person narrator, who uses
such language, in nineteenth-century formality, such things as
"remonstrated," "contrived," and "sustenance."
When he comes across a young woman sketching in the Kew Gardens, he is curious
about her. He runs into again enough times to use the word "fate,"
which he says he has never believed in.

I am
always interested when "fate" is evoked in a story, for since a story
is obviously a "made" narrative, everything that happens in it
happens for a reason, at least a narrative reason.

I am
also always interested when a character in a story makes a general statement
about the nature of reality, for it usually suggests that the generalization has
some thematic significance. The narrator tries to save a Japanese maple from a
fungal growth, but becomes taken by the strange beauty of the fungus, "the
subtlety of its opalescent colors, the intricacy of its structure." He
wonders "Are we right…to divide Nature as we do?" There would be no reason for a character make
such a statement in a short story unless it has thematic significance, for this
is not a novel in which a narrator has lots of narrative time to ponder things
in general just to show us he is a thoughtful and dependable storyteller.

Soon
after this observation about the fungus, the narrator sees the girl again and
notices how rough her elbow is, from "propping bars" he thinks then
"mentally rapped his knuckles" for his prejudice, and further reflects
that what he was feeling was closer to "tenderness, almost pity for that
nonchalantly uncared-for patch of skin."

When
he sees her again and finds out she is interested in studying botanical illustration,
he thinks of the fungus and the little patch of dry skin as similar in their
appeal and offers her the use of his library of botanical books, for he feels
"absurdly happy" with his garden and feels obligated to share it with
someone.

When
the young woman comes to use his books, he first brings her coffee and
chocolate cookies, as if she were a child, but later realizes that a martini,
crackers, and a dish of olives would be more suitable. He also discovers that
she has a male friend, although she tells him he is not her boyfriend. The man
is older than the girl, but the narrator is glad that someone loves her. He
watches them in the garden from his bedroom window, sometimes with binoculars.

Then
an "incident" occurs; he hears a "little scream" or a
"moderate cry" and sees the man stamping "almost viciously"
on something on the grass." Later that evening he looks and only finds the
outline of something "lozenge-shaped and sharp stamped into the
lawn."

He
never sees the man again and soon the girl stops coming also; he is hurt that
she did not say goodbye. When he goes into his library, he notices a book out
of alphabetical sequence. When he takes
it out he finds a hair, like a minuscule bookmark. When he lays the book down,
it opens to the middle with the illustrations flapping like a "lantern
slide show," (which finally locates the story in the nineteen century). He
notices that tendrils have been added to one of the engraved plates in pencil.
"They were almost obscene in the outline they limned." He takes down
other books and finds they too have been altered. He also notes that the books
have letters inscribed in red on the bottom edges. When he rearranges the books
in correct order with the bottom edges facing him, they spell—with gaps where
they had been replaced out of sequence—"on ly win ter is tru ."

At
first he felt a "shock of desecration." Now he feels a "wearying
sadness." He puts the books back in
the bookcase, locks the glass door, and throws the key away. It lands under the desk. "After some
thought, I retrieved it, and hung it, with the spare, by the clock, in the
hall."

And
that's the last sentence in the story.

There
are at least two kinds of mysteries in stories. First, there is the mystery of
fact or detail, something left out or not explained. In this story, the two mysteries are the lozenge-shaped outline
of what has been stamped in the lawn and the meaning of what is spelled out by
the letters on the books: "on ly win ter is tru ."

The
second kind of mystery is the mystery of motivation: why a character does
something that seems strange or perverse or simply unmotivated or unexplained. In
this story, the most obvious mystery is why the girl alters the botanical illustrations.
The other mysteries are why the man angrily stamps something in the lawn and
the mystery that makes this a story--why the narrator is interested in the
young woman and feels fated to have met her.

The
only clue we have to the mystery of the imprint in the lawn is that it is
lozenge-shaped, which suggests a diamond, and since the narrator refers to it
as a "sharp" outline, we might guess that the object the man has
stamped into the lawn is a diamond ring, presumably one he has offered to the
girl as a proposal of marriage, which she has turned down, perhaps because he
is too old for her. We can make these presumptions based on details in the
story, but cannot know for sure if we are correct. I am hesitant to make such a
presumption because I don't see how a diamond could make an indentation in a
lawn; it would have to be quite large, would it not?

Why
the woman alters the illustrations and what this means to the narrator are, of
course, the most puzzling mysteries of motivation in the story.

The
mystery of motivation is one of the most common challenges to understanding a
short story, for the drive toward significance in a short story is often more
pressing than the drive toward verisimilitude. Consequently, ordinary human
motivation is sometimes overridden by aesthetic motivation. The story's insistence on significance is
more pressing than its insistence on realism or ordinary human understanding.

That
goes against the grain of many readers, for they are more likely to think of
the behavior of characters in a story as being like the behavior of real people
in the real world rather than "characters" in a fiction there to
serve a certain "function" rather than to be "real-like." One
of the problems many folks have reading short stories is that they have a
limited notion of what "reality" means, usually thinking it simply
means the ordinary stuff that happens to ordinary people in an ordinary world. But
this is just not the case in short stories, for we are actually reading about
invented characters in an invented narrative who, even as they seem somehow
real and driven by everyday human motivation, are at the same time functions of
a story that "means" something.

In "Flora,"
we have a botanist whose life is governed by careful observation and
preservation of the natural world. However, as he observes, sometimes he is
drawn to, or interested in, or curious about, deviations from that natural
world—like the fungus that threatens the tree in his garden or the roughness on
the young woman's arm.

A thematic
convention that often occurs in the short story is that of a man who lives a
formally precise life, a life of science, a life of exactness, who deserves to
experience a disruption of that precision.
"Flora" may be that kind of story. The central character has
no life of his own except the life of his observation of the natural world,
which he finds predictable and precise, even though he suspects there is
something that always threatens that precision, like the fungus, which has a
kind of beauty, albeit destructive.

He
is drawn to the young woman and watches her relationship with an older man,
perhaps seeing acted out some desire which she cannot fulfill. Without
admitting his own needs, he watches his desires played out in the actions of
the man stamping the ring into the ground. The theme of the story demands that
the girl make clear to him that his notions of what is natural and precise and
predictable are susceptible to being undermined, even, as he says,
"desecrated." Consequently,
the theme of the story mandates that she make human changes in the precision of
the natural images that make up his life.

Even
as the narrator believes that the life of his garden, the life of the natural
world is real and true, she reminds him that only winter, only the frozen image
is true, only Keats' "cold pastoral" is true, for only beauty is
truth and only truth is beauty, and that is all you can ever know or ever even
need to know. Artifice, as Oscar Wilde loved to remind us, always triumphs over
nature. Thus, "on ly win ter is tru ."

I apologize
for going on so long about this story. I
obviously cannot do this for every story in the five volumes of Best British Short Stories, for it would
take months that I do not have. However, this story provided an irresistible
introit to whatever discussions follow, for it seems such an epitome of what
makes the short story form so fascinating to me.

I
always told my students that if they read a story that did not seem to make
sense to them, the fault would more likely to be theirs that that of the
author. I am still puzzled by David Rose's story, but that is my fault, not
his. I would appreciate hearing from any
of my readers who has a more satisfying explanation of its mystery.

David Rose has a new collection just out entitled Posthumous Stories, which includes
"Flora." I have just ordered a copy and look forward to reading
it. I thank Nicholas Royle for
introducing him to me.

Reality of Artifice

New Short Story Theories

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."